Calling all Retro Computing fans!

[Violetta]

Hey you guys! Jamie's looking for any of you guys with experience with retro computer. For those of you too young to recall the old days, it's computing with vintage hardware and/or software, or with the emulation thereof. It also spans creating new things that allow older computers or operating systems to interact with newer programs and peripherals.

Now, it very well may be a shot in the dark, but if any of you guys are into such a thing, I'd very much appreciate a reply to this thread. He needs help finding someone to talk old tech with that doesn't simply say 'Well, read this website that tells you nothing you don't already know.'

If any of you guys are into this and willing to talk about some old school computing, then you'd have my thanks if you put in a reply below. If not? Well... this is a tickling forum. Shot in the dark in the first place, right? 😉

 

[Smade1]

I wrote my first program in 1976 and have been dabbling since then. It depends what kit we're talking about as to whether I would be able to contribute anything useful.

On the other hand these guys would probably be able to answer anything:
http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=16

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Mostly it's pre-OS X Macintosh. I've been transitioning my workload as fully as possible over to my G4 and blue G3, both running Mac OS 9.2.2. I've got some boxes far older, too... but most of them are starting to succumb to age.

Mostly I'm trying to find out how other people keep their classic computers going. I don't want to have to use newer stuff... they suck! 😛

 

[kopfhorer1]

I totally agree, Jamie! Windows Vista is good for Microsoft's stock value, but it's not so good for getting stuff done. Even Mac OS-X which is otherwise a very good OS, is a little geegaw-intensive for my liking.

I too first fondled computer-flesh in the mid-1970's. I learned Fortran IV on a DecSystem-10. I fiddled with BASIC too, though I could never quite (you'll pardon the expression) hack assembler language. Hey, anyone remember batch (i.e. punched-card programming)?

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Kop, here's a screenshot from my current desktop system. It's a Power Mac G4 dual 500 running Mac OS 9.2.2.

My second box is a Power Mac G3 300 also with 9.2.2.

They're both great!

 

[kopfhorer1]

(Sigh) There used to be this hyper-cool place not far from here where they actually sold old Macs, G4's and G3's for about 50 bucks or so depending upon how they were equipped. They even had a couple of those lucite jobs from 10 years ago, weird-looking speakers and all! They had a history of the personal computer in that place too (look, a brand-new 1996-vintage Sound Blaster for US$1.00!). My current net rat came from there. Oh, and they had some 1970's-vintage workstations in a back room, resting on rows of tables just as they would have been in a computer center of that day (not functioning though). It was THE place to go for cables, computer speakers, and other things you wouldn't want to pay retail for, and power cords by the bushel for 50 cents each (or less!). Toward the end, they were branching out in the analogue direction (i.e. vintage stereo equipment). Sadly, the nonprofit which ran the business as a fundraiser decided not long ago to pull the proverbial plug.:cry

Oh, a while back I scored an advertising video for Apple from 1994 or so. They were comparing the Mac with the Windows 3.1 machines of that day, which was no way a fair comparison. Kind of like comparing a Maserati with a kid's plastic tricycle!

 

[the_jimmy_james]

Oh wow! That would've been something wonderful to find! There's a local Apple retailer here in town with a vintage room... unfortunately their prices are "vintage" and not "used".

 

[N/A]

More retro: Analog computers started at the end of WWII. The Boeing Corp employee newsletter is good for historical photos (mostly aircraft, of course). My favorite was from approximately 1950: an engineer, properly dressed in white shirt and tie, is sitting in front of a rack-mount analog computer (roughly 6 feet high) with the equations carefully written on a blackboard (identifying terms in the equations with knobs on the computer). The whippersnapper technical writer for the magazine stated that this computer dissipated so much power that it required 400 vacuum tubes to remove the heat.

 

[Horus]

Yea, ENIAC got all of the credit of being "The First True Computer", but the Brits developed "COLOSSUS". They were the computers designed to mimic the ENIGMA code machine. These were called 'bombes'.

Most were destroyed after WWII, but some were kept because of the classifed status. Besides, the ENIGMA had been kept because it was never released that the Allies had breached the German Kriegsmarine and Wermarcht codes.

After the Cold War, new coding machines were developed using the 'new fangled computers'.

My first system was an IBM 370/20. Twelve-channel paper tape to control the printouts, cardreader, Reel to reel mag tapes. Those were the 'Good Old Days' (yea, right). I was one of a handful of students in Junior High School in 1968 that were picked to do Computer Science instead of regular math. It was because we excelled in what was called "New Math". It was actually computer math (binary, octeal, hexadecimal, segadecimal).

So, I became an accountant, but ended up being a programmer, System Analyst and Manager.

 

[Tress Slave]

Well -- I'm an old fart, so I bought my first computer in 1981 --a TRS80 Model III that cost more than $1000! (I splurged and upgraded to 16k from 4 off the bat) another couple hundred bucks bought a floppy disk drive and a 48K upgrade a few years later.

But in middle school -- I took "computer programming" courses in a large room with 30 terminals and NO screens -- each desk had a terminal and paper ...

Back in the day computer games were like this.

LOJACK is firing phasers ...
Your ship at 18,12 has been damaged ...
YOUR ORDER SIR?: 3

ts

 

[Horus]

Most of the computer games back then were written in BASIC. "Hunt the Wumpas" was the classic on the mainframes (just don't get caught by the boss).

Game theory was just coming into it's prime back then. Everyone was testing the speed of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to see how fast each computer compared to each other.

BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, RPG, etc. were the only languages accepted back then. Mistakes were rampant, compiling programs took time so most programming was run at night (Graveyard Shift).

 

[scavenger]

Ah, my first experiences in real computing were in the informatics classes in school (around 1994-1995) they had a classroom full of PC's that had nothing but MSDOS installed for operating system, and we had to do programming exercises in Turbo Pascal. You'd need pages and pages of code just to get the most basic stuff going... Readln... Writeln... ah, those were the days... ;-)